


lexical semantics

by negativecosine



Series: the AU where they're linguists [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blindfolds, Consensual Kink, Contracts, Crying, F/M, Finger Sucking, Frottage, Humanstuck, Humiliation, Kink Negotiation, Self-Hatred, everyone knowing way more about Karkat's sex life than Karkat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:48:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some Semanticists Do Drugs And Terrorize Karkat: the Musical</p>
            </blockquote>





	lexical semantics

**Author's Note:**

> There's some stuff in here that I don't know how to tag for, but might be a little triggering- Karkat's thought processes in this are really explicitly and vociferously self-hating, and he knowingly builds relationships around that and kinks on it to some extent. Some of his sex partners also kink on it. 
> 
> This is part of a loosely-strung-together AU and you don't really have to read the others to follow any kind of plot here.

You don't know why Terezi keeps hanging out with them. They are terrifying, in a way that you cannot place, your fear of them sits low behind your molars and makes you grind your teeth in your sleep. They were terrors when they were all three in your semantics one class, and you changed your whole junior year schedule to avoid taking semantics two with them. But now they're all in the grad level course together, senior year, and you _cannot_ get what Terezi sees in Aradia and Vriska. 

You ask her, finally. Or, you sort of shout it ("WHY DO YOU HANG OUT WITH PSYCHOPATHS") into her tits. This is not completely your fault, as she seems to be trying to smother you at the time. It's like a face-hug from a two-by-four, but it does muffle you a little. She's got you pinned down by her elbows and knees, stabby as all hell, at your shoulders and the soft parts of your sides, just under your ribs. Sollux will see the bruises later, which is how he will know that you haven't even looked at that phonology paper yet. 

"Because," she says, and she is wearing the most hideous jeans imaginable and will not let you peel her out of them, so in addition to bruising you she is most definitely going to rub you raw like this. You gave up flailing and cursing at her a while ago. Like maybe a year and a half ago. But giving up means that basically you are hers to eviscerate, and honestly it feels like the whole universe boiled down into some pungent essential oil, all the torments and frustration you have ever known, distilled to this sharp girl digging all her bones into all your soft places. "They are cool and mean." 

"MEAN IS A REASON TO NOT HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE." You have a problem regulating your volume when she does this. Or- she's not really doing anything, actually, just holding you down and letting you squirm and feel emotions and hate yourself a bit. But it always leaves you yelling into her skin. She told you at one point she likes the vibrations, but you try not to think about that. "MEAN IS A REASON TO AVOID PEOPLE ACTUALLY." 

"I hang out with you, don't I?" She rolls her hips. You try not to fucking die of it. 

"WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN, I AM CARING AND SYMPATHETIC AND HAVE ALWAYS-" 

"Shit, hang on." Her phone is buzzing in her pocket. Which is right against your hip. You are going to fucking die. She answers it. 

"ARE YOU FUCKING ANSWERING IT," you try. You try to choke off your horrible voice halfway through, realizing that oh my god not only can everyone in the house hear you, but also now possibly people in an entirely different house. She ignores you, slaps one hand over your mouth and pushes down. (You have like five thousand boners right now. You are going to have to burn these underwear.) 

"Yeah," she says, eyes faced off into the distance like she can see who she's talking to. "Whose paper? Yeah. Oh that is _delicious_ ," and she pushes down on your face, and there are actual tears on your face, and you're sure she'll feel them, oh god. "Yes, that's excellent, don't do anything 'til I get there. What? No, he's fine, I'll be right over." 

"I HATE YOU," you tell her when she hangs up and puts the phone away, uncovers your mouth, swipes a thumb over your wet cheek. "YOU ARE HORRIBLE AND I HATE YOU AND I HOPE YOU WALK INTO TRAFFIC." 

She pats your cheek fondly, swings up and off you, finds her shirt and shrugs it on in half a second, and is gone. 

***

What Terezi is doing is pretty much completely fucking beyond you. Semantics after a certain point is completely fucking beyond you. Formal logic and pragmatics, you kind of get because you keep accidentally writing papers on anaphora. But half the shit Aradia is working on sounds like philosophy papers, and Vriska's so far up formal logic's ass she's pretty much a programmer. Terezi does syntax/semantics interface, which is the [anything]/semantic interface that gives you the most horrible sweating nightmares, and every time she makes you read anything she's doing in class, you sort of get flashbacks to intense, vivid images of standing mired in a pitch-black abyss of tar, screaming words but hearing only meaningless noise come out your mouth. 

It's basically all fucking unprovable bullshit, too, is what you tell them. Frequently, and at great length. 

But it's not actually the semantics that gets to you. It's the way they do it. Terezi works the same amount of time every day, from exactly nine in the morning to exactly noon, then from exactly three to exactly nine at night. She does not have shouting matches with her groupmates like she has with you- you always see them talking in low, intense voices. Which is really weird, because as a rule, her groupmates are not quiet people. Vriska and Aradia have shown up to classes drunk, high, tripping, and on actual speed at one point. Vriska went to a seminar on psycholinguistic methodology on four tabs of acid, interrupted the visiting lecturer, asked him why he'd treated his data like "cheap hookers, not even gonna take them out on a d8 first???????" then finished his entire talk for him, editing and correcting his powerpoint slides to account for a much larger margin of error as she went. And didn't get _expelled_ or even _talked to_ , because the entire faculty seemed to think this was uproariously funny, while all simultaneously claiming that she was absolutely not their responsibility. (Her official advisor was Scratch, but as he had pulled short straw for department chair this year, he generally had a good alibi whenever she made trouble.) 

You also know that the semanticists are- maybe not quite as close as the syntacticians in that they don't all cram themselves on one couch and fall asleep in each others' laps and wake up hungover, half-dressed, and spooning fervently, but you are pretty sure they've all fucked at least once. You are also absolutely sure that they all loathe each other. You are well-versed on Terezi's opinions on Vriska's 1.) awful hair, 2.) really sleezy drug dealers, 3.) fucking ridiculous papers, 4.) completely unfair grades, 5.) extremely questionable personal hygeine, 6.) absolutely illegal personal life, etc. etc. You have also caught Terezi glaring at the back of Aradia's head in various classes, because Aradia makes a habit of sitting in the absolute front, whereas Terezi has always favored the second row. (You usually try to sit in the back, but apparently it's not actually up to you when you have classes with Terezi.) You used to think this was a sort of crush, because it's true that Aradia is absolutely unfairly pretty, but then you read one of Terezi's semantics papers, which not only cites Aradia as an actual source but spends four full pages screeching horrendously at her theory before dissecting it viciously. You haven't checked to see if it's mutual, because you kind of don't want to know. 

What you do kind of want to know is how the hell Aradia managed to take the pictures of herself that are on Terezi's phone. There had to have either been a tripod involved, or someone else taking the picture, and even leaving aside the fact that sending Terezi pictures is pretty stupid, your mind supplies the theory that, in all likelihood, Vriska was holding the camera- and that it may in fact be Vriska's number that sent the picture. You have no way of knowing without actually asking one of them for their number, and you're already having a hard time dealing with, fuck, the images of all three of them, vicious and unyielding and drunk and high and destructive, destroying each other, and then you have to duck out of wherever you are and angrily take care of some stuff, and you would really like to just stop doing that forever. So You try really hard to put the whole thing out of your mind, mostly. 

Especially when questions arise in your mind like 'who's better in bed,' or 'whose papers does she like better,' or 'does she even like me, or is this just an elaborate plot to have more syntacticians terrified of her than Serket.' That's- yeah, that's not so great. 

 

***

There is the time, maybe only a week after you asked Terezi why she hangs out with these girls, that she shows up at your house at four in the afternoon, lucid-stoned, with a wolf-grin and absolutely zero underwear. You kind of say "oh," and she drags you out from under Gamzee and upstairs and puts you on the floor next to your mattress (which is also on the floor). And then she just sort of... rips all your clothes off and puts her hands over your eyes and you grab her wrists because you need something to hang on to. 

"I need to think," are the first words she says to you. You are naked and cringing and wiggling a little, and you are so, so glad she doesn't have to look at you like this. "Out loud," she clarifies, and then gets up and takes her pants off. She somehow does this without taking her shoes off, so when she straddles you again her sneakers still dig into your thighs a little, and you dearly hope those will bruise, too. You take her wrists, very carefully, and place her palms back over your eyes. 

"Okay," you say, and this time, your voice is wobbly but very quiet. 

What she needs to think about, apparently, is tense-aspect issues in Mandarin. Her pronunciation is atrocious; you don't know much, but you know she has dispensed with tones entirely, because she feels they are irrelevant data for what she's working on. Most actual sounds that leave peoples' mouths are pretty much irrelevant to the kind of linguistics Terezi keeps doing, really. However, she punctuates her careful recitation of data and analysis with squeezing her thighs around the sides of your hips. Her body is all hard and sharp where yours is soft, and though her junk never actually makes direct contact with any of yours, you feel that she is basically fucking you through the floorboards. You say "okay" a lot, feverish and blinded and dreamy. You feel like possibly you are hallucinating, a bit, in the small sanctum of her hands. You have no idea what she is goddamn talking about, you don't know a thing about Chinese except that it is really hard and has tones, but she is very certain that she has found grammatical markers for tense where previously it was thought that none existed. You suspect she is crazy. You feel like you are having a series of small orgasms, possibly. Or brain death, that is the other thing you could be having. She's barely touching you, _why_ , why are you like this, you hate yourself so much, you're such a useless tool, you don't deserve to feel this good, you want to die. 

"You are not listening," she says eventually. You could have been out for a minute, or maybe days, you wouldn't know. You're sweaty and shivering. 

"You said 'think,' not 'discuss,'" you tell her. 

Her thighs tense again, in the way that they have been (how is she not sore? How can she talk when you can feel her so close?) and she shifts, so that one hand covers both eyes, and the free one lightly slaps your cheek. You moan, and immediately regret it. "Do not mistake me for a lexical semanticist," she tells you. 

"Do not mistake me for someone who gives any kind of crap," you say, hoping for another slap. She gives it to you generously, so you moan for her generously. The gap between her thumb and forefinger rides the bridge of your nose and she uses it to steer your face into position. Your cheek doesn't sting yet; you wish it would. 

"You give all the craps." She pinches at your bottom lip, pulls at the meat of it. It jolts you more than the smacks- you squirm hard enough that she has to kneel up so she doesn't get knocked off when you flail your knees up. She waits for you to settle, but it takes you a minute. Your whole face feels like, like something she can fuck. Like something she definitely should try to fuck. You want to tell her this, but don't. 

Instead, you tell her, "You've been spending too much time with them, you're talking like that- that-" 

It's not that you can't think of a mean enough epithet for Vriska Serket. You can think of hundreds, you can center-embed relative clauses for miles about what a piece of toxic dangerous bullshit that girl is, but you cannot actually _say_ any of them, because you have two fingers in your mouth and you have automatically started sucking on them, because if you don't you will absolutely die. She hooks them down under your tonge, though, yanks your mouth open. You consider dying, but instead you just pant, shaking and sweaty and wet and, fuck, drooling a little, fuck, fuck. 

"Do you want to talk about her?" she asks. She lowers her body imperceptibly, so her thighs touch your hips, just barely. You give her an emphatic sort of nasal consonant, as best you can without actually moving your tongue at all. "Good," she says, and strokes your lip with the pad of her thumb. "Do you want to talk?" she checks, after a moment, and that makes you hate yourself even more. Fuck, why are people nice to you? Why are horrible amazing monsters interested in making you happy? You make the noise again, your voice all creaky and tight. 

"Good," she says again, and then crams one thigh between yours, and every part of you wants to wrap your legs around her and just, hump her leg until you are dead and your torment is ended, but you force your thighs open and keep your muscles lax because you know she wants you like this right now, little ragdoll Karkat, helpless pitiful fucked up sex toy Karkat. You're pretty fine with that. 

She doesn't give you enough pressure, which is how you're pretty sure that 1.) you are not allowed to _actually_ fucking come, and 2.) she is not actually intending to get off either, but she does shove her fingers in your mouth hard, and scrape your teeth as she pulls them out, and oh god definitely she can fingerfuck your mouth, yes, that is an adequate method of SOMEONE PLEASE FUCK KARKAT'S DUMB FACE, an important life-need that you have. Her other hand is sweaty and hard over your eyes and you can see all red, warm red on the inside of your eyelids, and you wish she'd black your eyes, scratch your face, wreck you up and leave you like you deserve. Instead what she does is put her wet- oh god, on your hip, and she's burning hot and you can't help it at all, you buck up against her, you are a terrible toy, the worst toy ever, and she makes this gorgeous noise like a laugh and finally just, fucks you _hard_. You come despite yourself, shaking and crying and gasping around her hands and she's so slick and hard and sharp against you, and then she just, stops. 

For a second you don't understand why- she's not finished, she's never had any compunctions about using you for exactly as long as she needs- and then you hear a buzzing noise. Oh, fuck. 

You actually sob when she takes her hands off your face and grabs her phone where it's vibrated out of her discarded pants and across the wood floor. You lay there, eyes squeezed shut tight because the light hurts and your forehead feels cold without her hot hand on it, and your tears feel cold when they trickle down into your ears. 

"Give me twenty minutes," she says into the phone, then may or may not actually hang up before she tosses it at your mattress. 

When she leans down, you think maybe she's going to kiss you. Nope. No. Not for Worst Sextoy Of The Year Karkat Vantas. She licks your tears up, two symmetrical lines up from your ears, then runs her lips over your wet eyelashes, and you sob again. You know she won't worry about you- you're kind of always like this after she fucks you. Not anyone else, just her, but she knows why, she knows you better than maybe anyone. She knows you'd also rather cry in private in a hot bath for an hour than have her hear you do it. So when she goes, when your whole body jolts with the cold places she leaves behind, you know, okay, it's not because she's a bad person. She just- she has to go write a fucking paper with someone who's not you. 

And that's. That's just fine. 

****

Possibly the most humiliating day of your life was the day Terezi learned about BDSM contracts. "We are not a lifestyle couple," you had told her, at great length and volume in the cafe. At least two of your professors probably heard you. "We are not a couple! We are not writing a contract where you get capitalized pronouns and I get referred to as 'the pet' and that's not, that's not a thing we need-" 

"Obviously not," she had said. Aradia and Vriska had nodded smartly and sipped their espresso drinks. Why Terezi had decided to bring this up when you'd only stopped by their table to ask something about the Norwegian paper is not totally clear to you- it probably has something to do with her Karkat Needs To Always Be Humiliated And Scared Because It Is Cute campaign, which has been an ongoing project for nearly a year now. (The sex only started maybe six months into it, possibly just as an escalation technique.) "Sit," she said, and you had sat without question. 

"You just need to clarify your terms of consent," Aradia had said, and those big creepy eyes of hers were so much more creepy when your entire goddamn sex life was apparently up for Semanticist Salon discussion. "Establish limits and needs."

"One day," you told them, "I am going to just walk into the woods. And never come back. And when you find my mangled body torn apart by woodsies and Kresge freshmen in the remains of a forest bacchanalia with ribbons in my hair and my nude remains strewn with nugs sacrificed to the nug god, you are going to take pictures, aren't you?" 

"You have weeeeird fantasies," Vriska said. "Who the fuck wants to _be_ the sacrifice to the nug god?"

"It is a more dignified fate." 

"Nevertheless!" Terezi's voice had a way of cutting through everything, though Vriska did not shut the fuck up with her gross cackling. "I have drawn up a draft!" 

"Are you shitting me," you said, because there was honestly nothing else to say that didn't involve actually just walking into the woods. You watched Aradia light Vriska's cigarrette. You watched Terezi sniff at the smoke and wrinkle her nose. You just, really, sat there and watched them for a second before your brain kicked back in. "Did your Ladies' Sewing Circle And Harpy Support Group run out of fucking PhD candidates to eviscerate? Tell me this is not a collaborative effort-" 

"It most certainly iiiis," Vriska laughed, and Aradia had pulled out her laptop. 

The google doc they'd written was four pages long, single-spaced. They'd explained it to you for forty minutes, and when you'd finally stumbled off to your Structure of Turkish class you were nearly fifteen minutes late. 

***

What you'd needed to do, obviously, was talk about it with someone who didn't make you feel like pulling your spine out of your eyeballs. So you let Gamzee get you high- he still insisted on rubbing his nose on yours when he shotgunned you, and you still insisted that it was not cute at _all_ as you scrubbed the stray paint off your face- and you sat in your room with him with the blinds shut and the lights off, both of you cross-legged on your bed, knee to knee, and you'd talked. 

"When you want a sister to stop, and to start," he said, "Seems most important." 

"Um," you said, because you were petting his flannel pants and they were really soft. "I don't want her to stop, mostly." 

"You want words to mean things?" 

"Fuck," you said, and dug your nails into his knees a little. "The fuck does that mean, words don't mean anything, fuck you." 

"You want 'stop' to mean 'stop,'" he'd clarified, thank goodness. 

"Oh," you said, and you had to think about this. Really hard. "Yeah," you said eventually. "Yes, that's probably- I've never told her to stop, though. I can't think of anything that'd make me want to- I don't actually think I have any limits." 

"Bullshit," he said, still all placid and doe-eyed, but it made you look up at him quick. The dim afternoon light from the blinds striped his face like some ancient monster. "Everyone got limits. You want her to cut your toes off?"

"What the fuck? No, fuck, no!" 

"So there's a limit," he told you. You thought about that for a minute, and the light in the room danced silently. 

"I don't want scars," you said, after you managed to figure out how words worked again. "I don't want to lose any of my body parts. I don't like- bathroom stuff, that's just not. No." 

"What do you like?" 

"Being nothing," you said immediately. You'd been looking at his cheeks, at the way the paint hid his skin, but he looked at your eyes really fast, just then, and it almost made you dizzy. 

"Sister Semantics," he said. "A motherfucker might want to be in on some specifics." 

"I like... not having a lot of say in what happens. I like crying." You couldn't look at him, when you said that, because he'd seen you cry for real, and it hadn't been cute at all. But, "Like. Sex crying. Crying isn't sexy and basically I am the most worthless piece of shit that exists but, sex crying." 

He nodded solemnly, which you liked, so you continued. "I like not deciding when it's going to happen. I like when she asks me before she does stuff because she wants to know I want it. I like blacking out a little. I don't like being drunk around her. I don't like people watching, but I like that she likes showing off." 

He nodded again, and then held up one bony hand. In the light, like that, all ribs and horrible dreads and paint, with his hand up and his legs folded, you thought briefly that he looked like a religious figure, like a fucked up prophet. "I got you," he'd said, and folded the hand down over yours where it was on his knee. You'd wavered, all stoned and messy and soft, and you didn't know if he meant that he understood, or just if he was keeping you. Both seemed good. 

***

Later, you'd found a printed version of the google doc, with clear segments where Gamzee had been allowed in to edit. You'd wondered if Aradia and Vriska had read the final version over Terezi's shoulder as she'd typed. You hadn't at all wondered who'd added the insufferable introductory pseudo-legalese paragraph at the top. You did wonder who'd added in the safewords. You'd signed it, then shoved it in your pocket and grabbed your rattiest hoodie and hugest headphones and walked to Terezi's place, and shoved it under her door without knocking. 

A little after that, she'd shown up at your place with a sharkteeth-kiss and a sweet buttgrab, and then proceded to sit in your living room and absolutely murder Sollux at Halo all night. You'd woken up on the couch with your head in her lap, her hand fisted in your hair. And that was fine too.


End file.
